Life Updates

According to my little tracker for my blog (aka, the folder structure that I set up shortly before taking a break), I've averaged 2 posts a month since January until July. Then I kinda went offline for a while. Why was this? Did I have another terrible death in the family? Did I go into the mountains to accrue knowledge to share with the people of the world? Did I just get bored?

No. None of those. It's actually far more boring: - I was getting annoyed by some of the ways the static site generator I use, Pelican, deals with things like internal links and static media and etc....
- I was learning Rust because I wanted to know something faster than Python.
- Zola had its own issues with internal links
- "How hard can it be to make a static site generator? It's all just text manipulation and file systems."
- "I'll write/post again once the SSG is done."

And that's all, folks! No crazy antics, just me getting in over my head. At time of writing, the static site generator is not finished. I'd say its somewhere between "processing the files" and "writing the output". The borrow checker was a huge pain for a while and killed my interest in the project for a while. I'm still making progress, just far, far slower than before.

In other news, I've received my first full-time position! I don't remember if I mentioned where my internship was on here before (and I'm honestly can't be bothered to check), but its the same place. If I've mentioned it before, I'm sure you can find it. If I haven't, I don't plan to state where I'm at... yet.

I've played a few fun games lately, as well.

Myst's 2021 reboot was amazing (even if the VR doesn't work in Linux), and I'm happy to have played it. The randomized puzzles are a welcome addition.

There's a game called "Forgotton[sic] Anne" that I must have picked up during some Humble Bundle at some point. It's not my usual type of game as I'm not usually someone to play platformers. That said, something about the hand-drawn art style and interesting story got me hooked. I won't spoil the story, but I do recommend it to anyone who likes story-driven games.

ECHO is an absolutely beautiful game that I wish I could see in VR, and I think would give me a heart attack if I actually played it in VR. The world is absolutely beautiful. The enemies are absolutely terrifying. I feel exhausted each time I finish a level because of how tense I am. Highly recommended if you can get past the ten or twenty minutes of forced walking.

The Old City: Leviathan is saying... something. I think I liked it.

Deponia: The Complete Journey is another puzzle game that has ridiculous logic, ridiculous characters, and lots of other ridiculous things. Some... questionable design choices for one character that I don't know if I should account to poor taste of joke, or to something more malicious. Overall, a fun experience. Bonus points for having developer commentary!

Moving on from games, I took a trip about a month ago to Virginia to visit Colonial Williamsburg and Busch Gardens. The latter was a disappointment, but I attribute that to it not really being my kind of thing (which I didn't realize before I arrived). Colonial Williamsburg was much more interesting, and I want to go back there again later this year around the holidays.